44 Scotland Street

mirrored cupboard above the hand-basin. This was a large cupboard, and she noticed that there were greasy fingerprints on the mirror near the handle where somebody, presumably Bruce, had touched the mirror as he opened the cupboard door.

A shared bathroom is not a place of secrets, and Pat felt quite entitled to open the cupboard. After all, she might store her things there too; Bruce did not have an exclusive claim to storage space, even if he was the senior resident.

There were three shelves in the cupboard, and all of them were virtually full of jars and tubes. Pat peered at the labels on the jars nearest the front: apres rasage pour hommes actifs; restoring cream for the masculine face; gel pour l’homme sportif. Pat leaned forward and made a closer inspection. She knew that men used cosmetics, but this, surely, was an over-abundance. And did men actually use body butter? Bruce apparently did.

Pat reached forward and took out the jar of gel pour l’homme sportif. Opening it, she stuck a finger into the oleaginous substance and sniffed at it. It was not unpleasant; redolent of cloves perhaps. She took a further sniff at the gel, and then the jar slipped out of her hands and fell to the floor. It bounced once and shattered, leaving a circle of green gel on the floor, like a small inverted jelly, covered with fragments of glass.

She stared at the broken glass and the now useless gel. A spicy smell hung in the air. So might Zanzibar smell, on a hot night, or an Indonesian bar with its cloud of clove tobacco smoke in the air; or the bathroom of a flat in Scotland Street. She left 560 SEC

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the mess where it was, intending to clear it up after her bath.

And she thought of her father, and a remark he had made about accidents and how they reveal our repressed wishes. We destroy that which we love, he had said. Had she intended to destroy Bruce’s hair gel, because she was falling in love with him?

Impossible. She could not fall in love with Bruce. She simply could not.

15. 560 SEC

Pat left the flat the next morning at precisely the time that Domenica Macdonald opened her door onto their mutual landing. Domenica, wearing a green overcoat and carrying a scuffed leather bag, greeted her warmly and enquired about her settling in.

“I’m very happy,” said Pat, but thought immediately of the fact that she had not told Bruce about the dropping of the gel.

“It’s all going well, or . . .” Quite well was what she meant to say.

“I know,” said Domenica, lowering her voice. “Bruce might be a little bit, how should we put it? Difficult? Is that the right word, difficult?”

“Different,” suggested Pat.

Domenica smiled, and took Pat’s arm as they went downstairs.

“Men are different, aren’t they? I remember when I first lived with a man – my husband, in fact, things being somewhat more respectable in those days, I found it very strange indeed. Men are so . . . so. . . well, I must say I don’t quite know the word for men, do you?”

“Masculine?” suggested Pat.

Domenica laughed. “Exactly. That says everything, doesn’t it?

Bruce is masculine. In a way.” She looked at Pat in a shared moment of feminine understanding. “They’re little boys, aren’t they? That’s what I think they are.”

They were now on the landing of the floor below, and 40

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Domenica gestured at the door of the flat on the right. “Speaking of little boys, that’s where young Bertie lives. You will have heard him playing the saxophone last night, I assume.”

Pat glanced at the door, which was painted light blue and bore a sticker indicating that no nuclear power was produced, nor used, within.

“Yes,” she said. “I heard him.”

Domenica sighed. “I don’t object to the noise. He plays remarkably well, actually. What I object to is his age.”

Pat was uncertain what this meant, and looked at Domenica quizzically. It was difficult to imagine how one might object to the age of another person: age was something beyond one’s control, surely.

Domenica sensed her confusion. “Bertie, you see, is very young. He’s about five, I believe. And that’s too young to play the saxophone.”

“Five!”

“Yes,” said Domenica, looking disapprovingly at the landing behind them and at the light blue door. “Very pushy parents!

Very pushy, particularly her. They’re trying to raise him as some sort of infant prodigy. He’s being taught music and Italian by his mother. Heaven knows why they decided on the saxophone, but there we are. Poor child!”

Pat found it difficult to imagine a five-year-old boy playing As Time Goes By on the saxophone. If it was a tenor instrument, then it would be difficult to see how his fingers would span the keys. And a saxophone would be almost as tall as the boy himself.

Did he stand, then, on a chair to play it?

“The whole point about childhood,” Domenica went on, “is that it affords us a brief moment of innocence and